The Cognac history - when nature shuffles the cards

Cognac, this golden drink that thrills both our mouth and nose has a long and exciting history. A history filled with great discoveries, coincidences and what happens when nature shuffles the cards.

Cognac distillery - Alambic
at Birkedal Hartmann

The history begins with the knowledge about distillation, a knowledge that was brought to Europe with the Arabs. The Arabs were not concerned about the art of distillation because they wanted to manufacture good alcohol, but because they were absorbed in the miraculous. Even today we will find references to this part of history in the name of the distillation unit that are used in producing cognac. The distillation unit is named Alembic, a word that is Arabic as the word alcohol is. Alem means world in Turkish, a meaning we also can find in the Persian language in the word alam. Some also means that Persia through the game Âs Nas have contributed in the evolution of poker. You can read more about this in our article about the poker history.

”Among those things that helps least against illness, Cognac is probably tasting best of those” many claims. If we travel back in time the opinion was less reflected, around 12^th century they thought that alcohol was very healthy, if you were drinking lots and often the chance for eternal life would be very good.

It isn’t only clogs and tulips that are coming from Holland, they have always been Cognac art a great nation at sea also, and some of the evolution of cognac we can blame on them. They soon became an important receiver of goods from the Cognac area, including wine. To sail in that period was an unpleasant affair, also for the wine they were transporting. The wine often reached the destination totally destroyed. The solution became to distillate the destroyed wine, and they got a product with indefinite durability, and a product that could be mixed with water. But drinking this couldn’t have been a great culinary experience. This alcoholic product got the name Brandewijn (thereof the name Brandy), a product later named cognac.

After the distillation of the booze it was stored in containers made by oak. In the Cognac area there were lots of good oak, another result of the coincidences in history. Ludvig the 14^th wished to dominate the ocean, and because of this one of his ministers started a massive planting of oaks so they could be able to build warships some time in the future (the oak will need about 100 years to grow big enough, so we may say he had a long perspective on his plan).

Barrels with cognac

But the coincidences didn’t stop there, or perhaps it was the nature that was giving a helping hand in shuffling the cards right? Because the ships weren’t exactly on schedule those days it happened that the oak containers were lying on the harbour for a long time. It wasn’t strike, but wars, revolts, epidemics and revolutions that caused this on that time. They discovered that this unintentional storing led to eh – an unintentional - but wonderful effect for both the smell and taste. The discovering of what storing of cognac in oak containers can do with the product was a fact. About the same time as this happened the poker evolution also took place, perhaps they played poque down at the harbour in La Rochelle while they were waiting for the ships to arrive?

The discovering of what storing of cognac leads to you can also find in Poker Cognac – Royal Straight Flush XO – Extra Old, a little piece of history about cognac and poker in a bottle.